Echoes from the Borderlands: Study One “begins” at 8am, off the coast of the Pacific Ocean, where “the wall inserts itself in the water like a sentence that bends down, bleeds down, into the margin of a page.” There, when a sound wave encounters the wall, it does not disappear. It bounces back toward its source in an echo.
The sound work by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum stems from the premise that every piece of documentation is the reverberation of an event. The 24-hour sound work previously exhibited at Dia Chelsea, Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two (2024), is a collection of echoes of the landscape across the US-Mexico border — timed with the drive along the length of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico: 72 minutes. The book and corresponding audio track published by Dia compress the first 12 hours of recordings; each page represents one minute, signaled with timecodes at the outer margins.
But for all the work’s emphasis on duration, Echoes as a publication is a vision of recursive time, of time that folds in on itself with no resolution. The sonic base of the work comprises a web of binaural and quadraphonic field recordings taken during the artists’ journey from the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego and Tijuana, along the border across California, Arizona, and New Mexico to West Texas. Their process of listening to the various sites along this trek results in fragments that upend the anthropological use of audio recording as a form of data collection or evidence (particularly as it relates to the border region).
Birthing whales in the Pacific, kids playing basketball in Calexico, hummingbirds in Lincoln National Forest, and military airplanes flying over New Mexico are all events, interwoven with verbal and sonic exchanges with residents and contemporary thinkers, as well as Luiselli’s own words in the form of imagined voices and the silent “READER.” Different parts of different stories are communicated simultaneously on the page, reflecting the staggered, palimpsestic nature of the audio. The relation between the US’s history of compulsory sterilization programs and the extractive economies of mining, oil, and water, for instance, reflect the entanglement of ongoing settler-colonialism. A wall tourist marveling at the structure’s physicality and an undocumented man on the phone with his girlfriend (“Yo por tus papeles / no me quiero casar …”) link the violence of spectacular constructions and of everyday mundanities.
The work itself has been described by Luiselli as a “sonic docu-fiction” and “aural essay.” It is also a piece of Land art — ephemeral, site-specific, and in line with Dia’s practice of stewarding art created in and with the natural landscape.
But where Land artists tended to regard the earth as a blank canvas, Echoes insists on its inextricability from its occupants and the history to which it bears witness. “You can’t settle the Earth, motherfucker, cause the Earth is in motion,” Fred Moten incants in one of the work’s archival recordings transcribed in the book, as if directly referring to the surge of protests in LA against ICE raids.
Luiselli, Giraldo, and Heiblum don’t attempt to repair — they simply listen. As the ground shifts beneath us with more and more force, the work’s one optimistic note is that echoes — as Luiselli writes in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) — “come back, always, to haunt and shame us.” Echoes, then, is an admonition, but also a promise, that time will never end.
Echoes from the Borderlands: Study, Hours 1–12 (2025) by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum is published by Dia Art Foundation and is available online and through independent booksellers.
